Data communication amongst data processing stations can be classified into the following four categories:
one-to-one PA1 many-to-one PA1 one-to-many; and PA1 many-to-many. PA1 Mai et al, "Performance Evaluation of an Ethernet LAN With Broadcast and Point-to-Point Data Traffic", 10 Computer Communication No. 6, pp. 283-290 (December 1987); PA1 Waters, A. G., "The Use of Broadcast and Multicast Techniques on Computer Networks", Conference on Electronic Delivery of Data and Software. IERE Publication No. 69, pp. 45-50 (September 1986)--and references cited therein; and PA1 Hughes, "Chat: an N-party talk facility for the Unix 4.2 Operating System", Computer Communications (1988). PA1 (1) a general participant station; PA1 (2) a retransmission station; PA1 (3) a designated recorder station; PA1 (4) a recorder playback station; and PA1 (5) a management station (optional). PA1 (1) Stock Market Trading Systems PA1 (2) Software Distribution PA1 (3) Teaching or Demonstrations PA1 (4) Communication with an Unknown Group of Receivers PA1 (5) Network Management PA1 (6) Network Security Monitoring PA1 (7) Computer Conferencing PA1 (8) Support of Different Companies PA1 (9) Backup Systems PA1 (10) Hot Standby Systems PA1 (11) On-Line Transaction Processing PA1 (12) Distributed Databases PA1 (13) Corporate Information Systems PA1 (14) Processing Control Systems PA1 (15) Parallel Processing Type Applications PA1 (16) Any other application that benefits from reliable one-to-many and/or many-to-many data communications.
The following is a brief discussion of known techniques for communicating messages in the various categories.